Jehovah's Witness woman from last week dropped off a "packet" this morning. This included a two page letter concerning our conversation, in invitations to a fall festival, along with two six page print-outs about how a god exists and the historical accuracy of Jesus. I threw it away. My husband had no issue with this. In his words, "What does she even know about you or us? Nothing. This is why I would never prosthelytize to a stranger. She doesn't know about your journey, your faith, what you have been through, or even how you were raised. A ten-minute guarded conversation resulted in her thinking she accomplished something and you being annoyed. What does she know?"

Exactly.

Folks, I have been searching for truth my entire adult life. It led me to some hard places. Now, I'm not going to walk around saying that there is no god, but I also know that the religious are unable to provide me with the truth that is necessary to believe there is one. Biased computer print-outs supporting your ideas are what I read for decades and I believed it. I was convinced that when the History Channel or a documentary questioned the validity of a historical Jesus...well, those people were just asshole atheists. It took me a long time to actually look at those people and accept that there may be some truth to what they were saying. You, a religious zealot who feels the need to knock on people's doors, are certainly not going to be the one to prove there is a god. People have been trying to do it for thousands of years. Learned people with years worth of learning. Philosophers, psychologists, theologians, pastors, Bishops, the Pope himself. None have proved the existence of a god. You think you can do this with two computer print-outs and a ten minute conversation? No. At this point, if there is a god, I'm going to need some proof, not philosophy. And I want to go on record as stating that if there is a god, and that god is the Christian god, he is an absolute asshole and I don't know if I would be all that keen on worshipping him. I used to, because I put more weight in the language of love from Jesus. But this also meant I ignored all the horrible god-sanctioned things in the Bible. If you believe the whole Bible is true and shows the character of God, then you must also know you are worshipping a god who told the Israelites to wipe out entire people groups, encouraged hostile takeovers, condoned slavery, and helped create laws in which women were nothing but property. So yeah, even if there was a Christian God, I'm not at all interested in jumping back on that bandwagon.